Talbott Street

Not long after having arrived in this city for a second time an inner voice began to take on harder tones, to employ harsher tactics, in its quest to force my exit - to boot my ass out, you might say, out and far away - suggesting that only more grief might lie in wait around the blind corner. I soon became victim to its relentless power - a knotted stomach, a quickening pulse and a tight-throated chord linking both to other forms of wordless fears. If I'd taken heed of this voice I would have left immediately following his death, wildly grabbing my flight bag as I blindly ran away. That has been my method, my always predictable ploy. Run, run, run, run, run. Yet, another voice, more soothing and passively calm, only today has begun to suggest otherwise. So I wait for the battle to end.

Odd, witnessing the dissolution of the tiny weak transient thing we call mortality. My bereavement has given me a slow learner's glimpse of an extraordinary man's solitary end: the pure neutral truth of the dreadfully infinite thing - death. I'm haunted by nothingness, the vacuum of his absence from tomorrow. Yes, he’s dead and gone now, untouchably displaced from our cozy continuum of space and time, but oh how easily I'm able to recall the sweet fading tenor of his soft sick voice. It's been a week now, and that voice still resonates within as his memory reconnoiters about these cold, gray December days.

We've parted for the third and final time, and the presently unbearable thought of his absence moves me to begin to fix in mind's eye his face and manner and voice and thought. His history. Ah! He would've laughed at that one. He ridiculed, always with significant humor, my need to summarize, encapsulate, derive meaning from given physical facts. That marks the continual point of contention, the tense cold place of our invariable difference. It is the exquisitely crafted rift which erupted between us throughout the many years of our friendship, and as I reflect upon that friendship I find that the sometimes great distances cast between us (geographically, emotionally) were the product of a single temperamental difference. While I habitually soared upon a flimsy carpet of abstractions he happily anchored his feet below. As a result I remain intrigued by the possibilities of lives lived differently. In our case there was between us, always, a remoteness, yet the inarticulate closeness of comparable hearts.

Without question, each successive departure became tougher to take, our farewells harder to bear. We met at college, Princeton, then parted after graduation in nineteen seventy-seven. He returned to his hometown, Indianapolis. I found a job in D.C. We communicated intermittently, a phone call here, a letter or card there, an occasional telegram. Five years after leaving Princeton, in late nineteen eighty-two, he caught up with me in London, by phone, and invited me to Indianapolis. I accepted, stayed a year and then left under brutally difficult circumstances. I returned to Princeton to teach, and there followed eight years of absence, silence but for a silly annual Christmas card and a telegram announcing the birth of his son. I vividly remember finding the telegram in my mailbox on a bright spring Princeton afternoon. It read: Nick. I'm a father. A boy. 8 lbs. Charly's well. Love. J.R.

And then came that awful call just a few weeks back when he asked me to return to help him die. Christ, I couldn't deny him! True, eight years earlier I'd scurried away from Indianapolis leaving a trail scented by anger and heartache and ruin. I'd moved east and left him for dead. Figuratively. He was anything but that, of course, the most animated man I've ever known. Yet I both hated and loved him, and the easiest, most comfortable, tact was to kill his memory. Strangely, I thought of him as dead, yet always presently possible. But now he is dead, and my challenge is to disentangle the emotions and assuage the pain while seeking the meaning of the years which were our lives together and apart.